No it should not. How parents discipline their own children is their own business. Provided it isn't with a belt etc and just a smack on the bum, then I don't see the problem. Other parents may choose not to smack and that is their prerogative. But I do tire of the government interfering in the personal lives of it's people. I am the one that made the child, love and experienced the financial burden of having children. I won't have a government department telling me how I can raise them too.

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I'm conflicted with this and perhaps can't answer until my boys are older.

I have no intention of using smacking for discipline. Just the other day I tapped DS1's hand on impulse when he was naughty in a dangerous way. But I felt instantly guilty - and he laughed anyway. I vowed right then that I didn't want to handle situations in that way.

In saying that, we were smacked as kids and we are all fine! And I tell you it worked, because as we got older we always thought twice about being naughty because we knew Mum would smack us, or get the wooden spoon. It hasn't affected how I view my parents at all.

I was smacked very rarely (maybe 4 times?, and even then it was not a belting like pp described, it was a tap on my hand. I am yet to find any reason to smack my own children.

I don't think smacking is effective discipline. By my parent's own admission, the reason they did not smack us as their main form of discipline is that they did not see it as having any positive effects on kids.

Should it be illegal? I really don't know. What constitutes a smack? If your child touches a hot-plate and you bat their hand away from harm, is that a smack? If we make smacks illegal, will we make it illegal to roughly grab your child? Will other physical forms of discipline be illegal too? My uncle used to nipple cripple his sons as a form of discipline, would this be ok and smacking not?

While I personally do not agree with smacking, I doubt that a law that made smacking illegal would target the right people or be effective in stamping out violence towards children.

We were smacked very, very rarely and my memories of it are laughing most of the time. Smacking is something that I've never really thought of doing with DS and I'll admit when I've seen it publicly I've flinched.

Currently the law, according to the article, says parents are allowed to use "reasonable" corporal punishment and then the next paragraph says this

"We know that a significant number of child homicides are the result of physical punishment which went wrong," Prof Moloney told Fairfax and News Limited.

There seems to be a very broad and undefined understanding of reasonable if death is the result of physical punishment.

Smacking is usually used as a punishment for behaviour, I saw this the other day which resonated with me..“If a child doesn’t know how to read, we teach.”

“If a child doesn’t know how to swim,we teach.”

“If a child doesn’t know how to multiply,we teach.”

“If a child doesn’t know how to drive,we teach.”

“If a child doesn’t know how to behave, we...........

..........teach?.........punish?”“Why can’t we finish the last sentence as automatically as we do the others?”

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